The 5 Key Principles of Client Service with Robert Solomon

Robert Solomon is the founder of Solomon Strategic, a consulting and coaching firm, and the author of The Art of Client Service. Before consulting he was president of two divisions at Ammirati & Puris, the agency behind BMW’s “the ultimate driving machine,” and he worked at Foote, Cone & Belding and Digitas. Andrew Dymski hosted this episode of Agency Journey and opened with one question: what small things could agencies fix to deliver a much better client experience? Robert answered with the five principles from his book, then explained how often he flew to see American Express.

Great relationships drive great work, not the reverse

When Robert wrote the first edition of his book, he assumed that if you took care of the work, everything else would take care of itself. Looking at the client relationships his own agencies had, and the ones other agencies had, he came to the opposite conclusion.

It isn’t that great work drives everything effectively or drives a great relationship. It’s the other way around. A great relationship drives great work… Most great work involves an element of risk, and most clients, at least the clients I know, are risk-averse. They sort of retreat to the more safe, or even the average, but if a client is going to take a risk, they’re going to do it with an agency that they trust. Trust is at the foundation of a great relationship.

(Listen at 03:39)

Andrew pushed back: a relationship sounds like a one-off thing you can’t scale. Robert disagreed.

I actually think in an odd way relationships are scalable because it’s a little bit of duplicate and replicate. If you do it well for one client and if you perfect the techniques, the skills, the qualities that define a really good relationship with one client, they should be very transportable to the next client and to the next client.

(Listen at 05:30)

The real new-business secret is keeping the clients you have

Robert’s view of growth runs against where most agencies spend their energy.

The big secret in the new business world is how do you develop the clients you already have and how do you preclude them from leaving, which is the sort of dark secret of all of the advertising and marketing services agencies that I deal with.

(Listen at 06:05)

Later, when Andrew connected in-person visits to account growth, Robert put it more bluntly: agencies get focused on the client they don’t have while a client they do have is sitting in front of them.

Show up, follow up, speak up, make it up, straighten up

Clients want surprisingly evident things from their agencies, Robert said, and he distilled them into five phrases to make them memorable. Show up means face-to-face contact, which he says nothing replaces, and especially when things are good, so there’s a relationship to fall back on when they go bad. Follow up sounds too simple to need saying. Robert has watched agency people fail at it over and over, and clients get enormously frustrated by radio silence.

If a client emails you, I would say, look, within an hour of getting that email, email back. You don’t have to have the answer. What you have to have is just acknowledgement: hey, I got your email, I got your voicemail message, I got your text message, here’s what I’m doing, here’s when I’ll come back to you. Clients feel a whole lot better when they’re heard.

(Listen at 09:52)

Speak up is shorthand for clear, concise communication, spoken and written. Make it up is about ideas, which Robert calls the currency agencies trade in. Straighten up is the blocking and tackling: budgets, schedules, and scopes of work, which he says take real skill and get short shrift.

Three weeks out of four at American Express

Andrew’s first follow-up was practical: how often should a remote agency get in front of clients when every visit costs a day and a plane ticket? Robert answered from his years at Digitas, headquartered in Boston, when his biggest client was American Express in New York.

I instinctively made a decision that not a week would go by where I wouldn’t walk the halls of 200 Vesey Street, which is the headquarters of American Express. And what I would do is, even if I didn’t have a meeting, I would invent one.

(Listen at 14:18)

He’d tell a client he was in town anyway and ask for breakfast, coffee, or half an hour, then use that meeting as the anchor for a day of others. One American Express client remarked that he saw Robert more often than the team from Ogilvy & Mather, whose office was up the block.

I don’t know how many assignments I dragged back to Boston just by showing up.

(Listen at 15:39)

Every agency has a reason not to go: it costs too much, it takes too long, the client doesn’t want to see them. Robert’s rule is that the bigger the client, the more frequent the visits.

When I was dealing with American Express, which was a very large client, I went to American Express, I kid you not, three weeks out of four, month in, month out, for all the years in which I led that account.

(Listen at 16:51)

Andrew’s last question was how creative people who struggle with operations can straighten up their own shop. Robert pointed to the how-to section of his book: eight chapters on meetings, conference reports, budgets, schedules, and scopes of work. His contact information is at artofclientservice.com.